


Nominative

by Jewels (bjewelled)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:57:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1594106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bjewelled/pseuds/Jewels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her codename was 479, and she really liked flying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nominative

**I. Flight**

"No names," she'd been told, when she'd been tapped for Project Freelancer. "This is a highly classified project, and we would prefer not to give our enemies any information they can use against us. It's really for the core personnel, but in the interest of not creating a sense of isolation, we've extended that to the rest of the Project members."

Sounded dehumanising, but she didn't point that out. Instead she shrugged. "Fine by me." She had the dumbest name ever to be cursed upon a human being, and it had earned her so much grief in previous assignments that it was practically a relief to leave it behind.

The officer sorting out her paperwork nodded, and scowled at his screen. "Your codename will be Flight-479." He glanced up at her. "You can abbreviate that however you like."

"Swell."

The officer seemed immune to her sarcastic tone, simply handing her a readout. "Your new assignment."

It only took reading the first three lines to feel a sense of dread settling over her. " _Pelicans? Really?_ "

"You have a problem, Flight-479?" The officer was peering at her, eyebrow raised, obviously having expected her reaction, and from the way his mouth was twitching he was finding her outrage amusing.

"Sir." She drew a deep breath. It would be unseemly to punch a superior on the first day at a new assignment, one that she'd been head-hunted for. She was also unsure whether the discharge from a black ops project involved a severance package or a bullet to the head. "Sir, I've been one of the top fighter pilots in the fleet for the past two years, my combat scores-"

"Are not disputed." The officer leaned back in his seat. "We need pelican pilots who can do more than the standard drops and pickups. Our focus is on developing elite ground units, not space combat. We need the best to protect our assets."

So not only was she supposed to give up fighters for craft that handled like whales in a shopping cart, she was supposed to babysit a bunch of prissied-up soldiers while she was at it. She briefly considered telling the officer exactly where he could shove his pelicans, but the thought of her duty, of exactly why she had joined the military in the first place, punctured her wounded pride and she felt the fight go out of her. "Yes, sir," she said.

"Do you have any further questions?"

"No, sir."

"Then, Flight-479, you are dismissed."

"Let's just go with 479, sir," she said, and when he nodded with a small smile, saluted, and left the room.

**

The 'whale in a shopping cart' description was generous. Pelicans were troop transports, not tricked out fighters designed to make physics weep as it performed astrobatics and shredded enemies. 479 was fully qualified and checked out on pelicans, and had been for a long time, but one of the first things she did after hitting the deck of the Project's mobile base, named _Mother of Invention_ by someone who was probably paid too much to come up with quasi-poetic descriptors, was to check out a pelican and put it through its paces.

She could only do so much in space. It wasn't possible to replicate atmospheric conditions, the effect of weather or even the presence of a team being a nuisance in the back. Still, she was satisfied that she wouldn't disgrace herself immediately upon launch. Later on, she'd get together with the techs and see if there was any way they could improve the responsiveness and maneuverability of the craft. But, for the moment, she was satisfied.

Thus, predictably, her first assignment went straight to hell.

_Mother of Invention_ had been forced to hold position outside the system they'd been assigned to infiltrate, out of range of sensors. They'd made a quick jump into the system, launched the pelican, and then beat a hasty retreat before anyone could ping the ship and get too much information on it.

The mission had gone well, but the exit had gone poorly. The team had come in hot, and 479 had been forced to hold position while they boarded. They'd taken a rocket to the portside as a result, and while it hadn't done any critical damage, some wiring had burnt out, and half the automated systems refused to cooperate. It meant that 479 had to ride the controls the whole sixteen hour flight back to _Mother of Invention_ , unable to look away from the controls for more than a few seconds at a time.

After she'd snarled at South Dakota, the mouthy one who'd tried to give her a hard time for their dramatic exit, the rest of the team had left her alone. All except for Maine, the white-clad operative who hadn't said a single word that she'd been witness to during the entire mission. He was the last person she'd expect to come up to the cockpit, thankfully shutting the door behind him to keep the chatter of the team out.

He climbed into the co-pilot's spot behind her without a word.

"Unless you're checked out for pelicans, you can take a hike," she snapped, hands moving constantly, balancing systems that should have been taken care of by the computer.

She heard a vague grunt, and then her console acknowledged the passing off of RCS management to the co-pilot's seat.

"Right," she said. "I'm not apologising, by the way. But thanks."

She blinked, and suddenly realised how gritty her eyes felt. "Crap," she muttered, "I'll be lucky if I don't fall asleep and kill us all at this rate." She kinda wished they were planetside, that she could crank a window and get a blast of fresh air to the face. She hadn't had to fly this much on manual since her training days.

Maine was silent behind her, and she started to think that he was incapable of speech. But then, he made a sort of huffed snort of amusement, and proceeded to tell her the stupidest, and yet somehow filthiest joke she had ever heard. Her laughter had Agent Carolina opening the cockpit door to check what was going on, and she was still chuckling on and off when they finally made contact with the ship, six hours later.

But at least she hadn't fallen asleep.

**

**II. Landing**

Capital ships weren't meant to land on planets, and pelicans weren't meant to land on people. Not all things, 479 reflected ruefully, happened the way they were meant to.

She had no idea what happened. One minute everything was fine, then a security alert was blaring, and while she'd been securing the flight deck under the deck chief's orders, the ship had started shaking, having obviously come under fire, and then it had started crashing.

479 had been involved in what was euphemistically named 'an uncontrollable atmospheric reentry' once before in her career. She'd never forgotten the howl of metal as it superheated, offset by the screech of alarms. But that had been a small ship, not one the size of _Mother of Invention_ and she had forgotten what would happen when a ship whose artificial gravity had failed encountered a planetary gravity well.

That was when the Pelican had landed on her, and then _Mother of Invention_ had landed on the planet.

The ceiling was a lot closer than it should have been, 479 thought, staring upwards from where she was pinned against deck plating and sandwiched between debris. If the bulkheads had crumpled enough to allow that to happen, then the decks below her had no doubt concertinaed, and everyone in them had been crushed. The whole ship was tilted at an angle, and most of the contents of the flight deck had slide backwards to pile up against the crash barriers. Most of the crew was probably back there, trapped or crushed by their own ships.

She couldn't feel her left arm or leg. That was probably bad.

There was a tear in the hull, and the space doors had been torn apart, revealing an icy tundra that was allowing snow to start drifting inside. It was chased by an arctic wind, and 479 was starting to realise that her flight suit wasn't weatherproof.

Footsteps were coming closer, uneven and lacking the heavy clomping tread she would have expected from the ubiquitous body armour that most of the crew wore.

"Wash," she gasped. It took her a moment to recognise the man out of his armour. He was wearing loose medical scrubs, and she abruptly recalled that he'd been locked in medical for some time now, off the duty roster, and gossip had been speculating wildly about why he'd been quarantined.

His hair was a mess, and he was staring around with wide eyes, but he hadn't much in the way of visible injuries. When she called his name, he looked at her, but she wasn't sure whether or not he could see her.

"I know you," he finally said, and his voice was taut, hollow. It sounded nothing like the Wash she was familiar with, the one his teammates routinely took the piss out of. "I know... you saved my life once, I was impressed with you." Then Wash abruptly grunted, and raised his fists, tightly clenched, to his temples. "Saved _him. He_ was impressed. Shit."

479 suddenly realised that Wash wasn't supposed to be out of medical at all. He'd probably broken out when the systems went down during the crash. "Yeah, Wash," she said, carefully, trying not to sound too impatient or angry. "And now I need your help. You need to get a rescue crew or something. I can't... I can't move, Wash."

There was the sound of gunfire, the rapid tap-tap-tapping noise echoing strangely through the off-kilter hangar deck, and Wash turned his head to look at the gap in the hull, distracted. Were they under attack? Was whoever had crashed _Mother of Invention_ coming to finish the job, to massacre the remaining crew?

"What the hell is that?" she gasped out. Her lungs ached in the cold air. She had been wearing her helmet when the attack had hit, but it had been knocked off during the crash. It was probably a good thing. Her suit's power plant was offline; she would probably have suffocated.

"Maine," Wash said, sounding more exasperated than fearful. "They've sent out teams to try and bring him in. And then they'll have to send out medical teams to bring the bodies back. The Director's always underestimated Maine."

"And you don't?" 479's other side was starting to lose sensation. "Wash, I really need help. My vision's going funny..."

He didn't react to her plea, and she wanted to scream at him, demand to know what the fuck was wrong with him, what had happened, and why Maine was being hunted down. Everything had been fine an hour ago. What had changed?

"Did you know?" he asked, his voice so soft that she almost didn't hear him. He was staring at her now with frightening intensity, his gaze boring into her. "Did you know what they were doing?"

"Wash," she gasped, "I don't understand-"

He moved, so fast that she thought, for a microsecond, that he must have borrowed Carolina's speed augment. He was suddenly looming over her, and in his hand he had a jagged piece of metal debris which he had pressed against her throat. He must have been holding it the whole time, keeping his body turned away from her so that she couldn't see it. His breath was sour, overmedicated.

" _Jesus fuck, Wash_ ," she yelped, before the makeshift blade dug into her throat. She didn't think it had broken the flesh, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to tell.

"Did you know?" he asked her, his voice utterly calm and even. She would have thought that the Agent Washington she knew would never have sounded so calm, but she suddenly knew without a doubt that the man in front of her would be capable of killing her without flinching. "About the AIs?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, as loudly and clearly as her burning lungs would allow her. "I've never had anything to do with the implantation experiments. I'm just your pilot." She took a deep, shuddering gasp that nearly made her cough. "Your pilot, Wash. 479, your friend?"

They'd never socialised outside of missions. They'd never exchanged words that were anything other than professional and job-related, but he was clearly not in his right mind, and maybe he was confused enough to believe her claim of friendship, enough to spare her.

For a moment, she thought it hadn't worked. Then he flinched, and looked at her neck. "This isn't me," he said, and clenched his jaw. "Not me. Christ, Florence, what did they do to me?"

If there was one thing she wasn't going to do, it was demand to know how the hell he knew her name. But she felt like there was a whole story she was missing out on, that there was something she wasn't getting. "I don't know, Wash, but I need you to find a medical team or something. Now."

"Medical team," he muttered, "Right." He moved away, out of her field of vision, and she couldn't turn her head to follow him.

Outside the gunfire had fallen silent.

**

Nerve damage was the verdict. 479's spine was intact, and they'd rebuilt her crushed left side, but her fine motor control was not what it was. Her flight status was revoked, and there was no chance that it would ever be reinstated.

479 wasn't supposed to know who had been responsible for the the attack on _Mother of Invention_ , but black ops types gossiped amongst themselves as much as any other human, and she knew enough to want to track Tex down and strangle her with 479's now permanently trembling hands.

"So what," she asked, bitterly, "Medical discharge? So long and thanks for the ride? Fuck."

She couldn't fly. She'd never be permitted to fly again, her reflexes shot from the damage done during the crash. She wanted to cry, or scream, or hurt someone. The warring desires clashed in her chest, and she found herself simply immobilised by grief.

The officer who delivered the news of her revocation was the same that had inducted her into Freelancer all those years ago. He looked older now, but then again, they all did. "In the aftermath of the... incident, the Project has decided to refocus. We need to retrieve our missing materiel, and the Recovery team will require skilled coordinators who are already read into the Project and are familiar with the players."

What was her other alternative? Go back to civvie life? Flight was barred to her either way. What did she have to lose? "Whatever," she said, "Fine. Yes. I'll do it."

The officer wasn't deterred by her lack of enthusiasm. "Excellent. We'll update your file and codename when you're fully recovered. Feel better, 479."

_Go fuck yourself,_ she thought. But if she'd tried to flip him off, her fingers would have betrayed her. "Thank you, sir."

**

**III. Grounded**

She was arrested along with the rest of the operations crew. The Director had disappeared, presumably having gone to ground to escape the wrath of the oversight committee. Most of the Project, she thought, would probably get a quick hearing, and when it was established that they knew nothing about the Project's workings, having only been assigned to grunt work, they would probably be given a light sentence and re-integrated into the military.

She was _Command_. She doubted she'd get the same consideration. If she'd still been Flight-479, maybe they wouldn't have decided to make an example out of her. Instead she was escorted everywhere by three armed guards, as if she was some sort of crazy ninja who'd take them all out in a bid for freedom.

She'd made acerbic comments about not being that kind of girl, but they'd ignored her.

She saw Washington for the first time since the hangar deck in the holding area, prior to their initial hearings. They'd spoken, each other's voices carrying across the radio waves, but the last time she'd been this close to him, she'd thought he was going to kill her.

"You look terrible," she said, as her counsel directed her to sit down before he disappeared to prepare. "Worse than that time North and York got you wasted before zero-g combat training, and you nearly disgraced yourself in front of the Director."

Wash was still in armour, though his helmet had been removed. She doubted he'd been permitted to retain any other equipment, though, possibly, the committee didn't have the equipment to remove specialised Freelancer armor without fear of setting off something potentially lethal.

He looked at her for a long, silent moment. "You should see Maine," he said, eventually, having come to some sort of silent conclusion.

Her mouth twitched. "He's alive?"

"After a fashion," Wash shrugged, though the motion was swallowed by the armour, and resulted in barely a twitch. "Though I'm not sure that he didn't die back during the crash. Part of me hopes-" He abruptly halted, and turned his head away so that he couldn't show his eyes. "Never mind. Forget I said anything."

She looked down at her wrists, turned her hands over and watched them rotate inside the cuffs. "What's going to happen to us, you think?"

"Prison if we're lucky, firing squad if not." Wash snorted. "I'm betting on not. My luck is fucked."

She sneered at him. "Well aren't you a pretty ray of sunshine."

"You want me to lie and tell you it'll all be alright? Try someone else, _Command_."

She laughed, bitterly, and for far too long. Wash was looking at her strangely when she finally stopped. "You know what my call sign used to be?"

"Of course, it was Flight-47-"

"No, not my Freelancer assigned codename. My callsign, back when I was a pilot. A proper pilot, not a glorified bus driver." She twisted her wrists again, but the cuffs didn't budge. They were solid, rigid, a static bar that kept her hands too far apart for her fingers to touch.

"Nightingale?" Wash hazarded, with a wry twist to his mouth.

That was right. She forgot he knew her name. Never actually told her _how_ he knew, but starting that argument seemed a bit childish.

"Yeah, it was for a while. Pretty obvious, of course, but the fact that the joke is dumb never stopped a bunch of fighter jocks from laughing at it." Pilots didn't give themselves call-signs. It was bad form, and she wouldn't have picked Nightingale given the choice. She'd had to put up with that bullshit ever since she was a kid, and if she'd bitched about it too much, it would have stuck permanently.

"Dancer," she said, eventually, "Because I made the mistake of listening to some upbeat track in the lockers and not realising the rest of my wing was also there, laughing until they were pissing themselves at my uncoordinated flailing. But, you know, I loved that callsign. Whenever I got in a fighter, I felt like I could make it dance, like everything my body was too stupid to do was possible in a fighter. I even got pelicans to move like they had some damned grace."

She clenched her hands into fists. "I was a good pilot." Even now, her hands trembled uncontrollably.

"The best," Wash told her, softly.

There was a commotion by the door. Her counsel had returned, and she was, apparently, up next before the judiciary board.

She stood, but before she followed her counsel out, she glanced back at Wash, who seemed to be regarding events with a stony dispassion that seemed somehow inhuman. "You attacked me once," she said, wondering if he'd forgotten.

Apparently he hadn't. "Yeah, sorry about that," he said, not sounding at all repentant. "I was crazy."

"You're still crazy."

"Yes, but I'm better at hiding it these days."

"Right. Hey, Wash."

"Yes?"

"If it is the firing squad, I swear to god I'm going to spend eternity haunting you and the rest of your batshit crazy associates."

"That's fine," Wash said, and smirked at her. He leaned against the wall, closing his eyes like he was trying to take a nap. "The rest of 'em are already doing that."

She smiled without mirth, and thought about what she could say as a comeback but realised that, in all honesty, she had nothing much to say. Instead, she squared her shoulders, and followed her guards out of the room.

\- End -


End file.
